Further delay to the Airbus A400M military transport now seems inevitable. “There’s an obvious risk of slippage,” Carlos Suarez, head of EADS Military Transport Aircraft (MTA), said here at Farnborough. The first A400M ceremonially rolled out from the brand-new final assembly line building at Seville, Spain, on June 26. Officially, the program is running only six months late; the first flight will be in “late summer” and first delivery in April 2010.
The most pressing concern to date has centered on flight certification of the aircraft’s powerful TP400 turboprops–the largest ever to be developed outside Russia. The TP400 fitted to a C-130 test bed by Marshalls at Cambridge, UK, was ground run on the aircraft for the first time on June 10. But AIN has learned that four weeks elapsed before a second ground run took place last week. Previously, program officials said that 30 hours of ground running were required, followed by 50 hours of flight time on the C-130, before the A400M could fly at Seville. Suarez now says that “the test bed program is not a precise number of hours.”
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